AltaVista details e-commerce hosting service

AltaVista continues a series of attention-grabbing initiatives with an announcement of a new e-commerce hosting service for small and midsized businesses.

3 January 200211:43 am AEDT

AltaVista continued a series of attention-grabbing initiatives
with an announcement today of a new e-commerce hosting service for small
and midsized businesses.

As previously
reported, AltaVista introduced its Homebase StoreFronts service, a new
e-commerce solution created for merchants who want to capitalize on the
traffic that flows through the AltaVista network.

Homebase StoreFronts is expected to be used by more than 200 local media sites around the world by year's end, according to company executives.

Developed by AltaVista'sZip2 unit, Homebase StoreFronts aims to
expand "local portals" created by newspaper and media sites. The first Zip2
partner to use its e-commerce capabilities will be the Houston
Chronicle'sHouston4U.com; the
New York Today site of the New York Times also runs on Zip2
technology.

In a separate announcement, Zip2 said the Washington Post, previously allied with Zip2 rival Tickmaster CitySearch, has signed with Zip2.

"It is directly competitive with what Ticketmaster-CitySearch is doing and
with what any other local Internet site would be offering local merchants,"
Bruce Murray, Zip2's vice president of marketing, told CNET News.com in an
interview from Chicago, where the new program is to be unveiled.

The announcement follows a series of high-profile moves by AltaVista in the
last week. Earlier yesterday, CNET News.com reported that AltaVista intends
to roll out a free dial-up ISP service in conjunction with start-up 1stUp.com.

Separately, AltaVista yesterday unveiled a new stock and finance
channel, along with personalized pages to compete more directly with the
popular My Yahoo and My Excite. AltaVista will spend $10 million to market
these features in the next ten weeks.

Both steps shortly followed CMGI's June
29 bid to buy AltaVista for
$2.3 billion from Compaq Computer. The
deal has not yet closed.

Like the finance channel and customization, the effort to host e-commerce
is essentially a bid to make up lost ground, at least with Yahoo, which
bought a storefront hosting operation called Viaweb in June 1998. Yahoo has
not emphasized its localized hosting operations, however.

"We have staked out the local space with local media company partnerships,"
said AltaVista's Murray, noting that Zip2's local portal client list
includes newspaper chains Hearst, McClatchy, and Freedom Newspapers. In
Canada, phone carrier Telus has
launched MyBC.com in Vancouver, B.C.,
and plans to roll out sites in other Canadian cities. Paris' well-known
Le Figaro is another licensee.

Zip2's services include sports, news, personal finance, community aspects,
Web directories, Web searching, and free email. The store-hosting service
is slated to roll out by September.